Science

Simon van der Meer (1925 – 2011)

TU Delft alumnus and Nobel laureate Simon van der Meer died early this month in Geneva, where he had been residing since 1956. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1984 for his cunning design of particle accelerators at Cern.

Simon van der Meer, who died on 4 March 2011, came to study at TU Delft immediately after the end of the Second World War, having waited two years after completing his gymnasium exams in The Hague. In Delft he studied Technical Physics and chose the then new discipline of ‘measurement and regulation technology’ as his specialisation. The post-war education was ‘of necessity somewhat limited’, he later wrote. He added that he had often missed the intensive physics training that many of his colleagues at Cern had enjoyed. On the other hand he felt that his ‘slightly amateur approach to physics, combined with much practical experience, was an asset’. 

In a recent obituary in De Volkskrant, Professor Jos Engelen, the former scientific director of Cern, said: ‘Simon was no scientist but rather an engineer in the best positive meaning of the word, someone who used his expertise and intuition to build exactly the accelerators that we physicists dreamt of.’

Van der Meer was awarded the 1984 Nobel Prize for physics together with former Cern director, Carlo Rubbia, for the their detection of W- and Z-particles. The W- and Z-particles convey the weak nuclear force, which is one of nature’s four fundamental forces, together with the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity.

The particles were supposed to be revealed during highly energetic collisions between protons and antiprotons in the 27-kilometre long, large electron-positron (LEP) collider at Cern. But that accelerator was hardly powerful enough. By the mid 1970s, Van der Meer and Rubbia had developed ingenious ways to intensify the collisions by packing and storing protons and antiprotons. This involved ‘stochastic cooling’, a process invented by Van der Meer that uses the feedback from electrical signals of particles to keep them tightly packed together in a beam, thus increasing the intensity of the collisions. 

Van der Meer married Catharia Koopman in 1967, with whom he had a daughter and a son.

Op het Plein in Den Haag, pal tegenover de Tweede Kamer, bouwen de studenten een levensgrote studentenkamer na. Ook is er een quiz over studentenkamers waaraan de Tweede Kamerleden, Mark Harbers (VVD), Ineke van Gent (GroenLinks), Jan Paternotte (D66), Bas Jan van Bochove (CDA), Jasper van Dijk (SP) en Lea Bouwmeester (PvdA) meedoen.

Twee derde

Aanleiding voor de actie zijn volgens de LSVb de resultaten van een onderzoek van de website www.checkjekamer.nl onder 26.000 studenten. Daaruit blijkt volgens de vakbond onder meer dat twee derde van de studenten ‘veel te veel’ huur betaalt. Op 12 mei maakt de LSVb de gehele rapportage openbaar.

Het gebrek aan voldoende betaalbare en kwalitiatief goede studentenhuisvesting is de LSVb al jaren een doorn in het oog. Naast de te hoge huren blijkt volgens de LSVb ook dat de brandveiligheid van studentenhuizen een ‘groot probleem’ is en dat het vinden van een kamer lastig blijft.

Editor Redactie

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